On the Feast of St Michael the Archangel in 2013, my three co-novices and I lay prostrate on the cold stone floor of the Cambridge Chapel, making our simple profession, and we were asked by our Provincial: ‘What do you seek?’ Our response, as for many thousands before us: ‘God’s mercy and yours.’ Read more

This post builds on many of the themes highlighted by Br Luke in his post on ‘Education’ and looks through Dominican eyes at how ‘the rich heritage of Christian spirituality, the fruit of twenty centuries of personal and communal experience, has a precious contribution to make to the renewal of humanity’ (LS 216). What I take to be the Pope’s key point in this section of his encyclical is that such an ‘ecological conversion’ has to be a conversion of the entire person. It cannot be just an idea or a concept that we hold, it has to be a complete way of living. Read more

In our Consecrated Life series we have been looking at numerous aspects of this way of life through a Dominican lens. It is always helpful, however, to have another perspective and in his excellent book, Radical Discipleship – Consecrated Life and the Call to Holiness, Francis Cardinal Arinze distils the fruits of decades of experience as Bishop, Archbishop and Cardinal, in which time he has visited and encountered countless religious and their communities from a multitude of congregations and orders. Drawing upon this experience he seeks to give us something of what is fundamental to all modes of the life and thus to examine the very heart of what it means to live the consecrated life.Read more

Last year I gave a presentation on vocations to a group of teenagers in a Catholic school. At the ‘Q&A’ session one of the pupils asked me, why can’t you just have a job as well as do what you do? I didn’t really have an answer for him, apart from “we’re not allowed to”. The fact is, he did have a point. What is it that Dominicans do all day? Or generally speaking, what is it that consecrated religious actually do? Although that seemed to be a basic question, I did not have much of an answer other than we could not be consecrated religious, if we also had full time jobs, our own homes and personal property.Read more

Since joining the Dominicans, a little under three years ago, one of the comments I have most often heard, from people outside the Order, is, “It’s great that you have had some experience of the real world” – this is, I presume, with reference to the seven years that I spent working as a solicitor for a City law firm and probably not the two gap years, either side of University! Read more

For a start, everything is Trinitarian. God is a Holy Trinity in Unity, and all creation is made through the Trinity (cf. Jn 1:3; Col 1:16). It should be no surprise, then, that the consecrated life is deeply Trinitarian. This was put succinctly by St John Paul II: 'The Consecrated Life, deeply rooted in the example and teaching of Christ the Lord, is a gift of God the Father to his Church through the Holy Spirit’ (Vita Consecrata, 1). Read more

I guess we all have come across charismatic people in our lives. It might have been in a personal encounter, it might have been through the media. What is it that makes them charismatic? What makes them so compellingly attractive? What is it that, when they enter a room, the atmosphere really changes? Read more